Umm, hello. Let me introduce you to these magical little headphones. Put them on, because you catch recovery through the ears. But before you can do that, you’ll have to bring that nasty little mouth that runs like a freight train inside your head to a screeching halt, and (no disrespect intended) but you’ll have to zip it for a second.

We are one. That’s pretty much the bottom line. That means you, me, the fat Wall Street guy stuffing his bedroom with prostitutes and his face with foie gras, the cashier at the check out at the Quickie Chick…yup, we are all connected. And that my friend is a FACT whether we like it or not. (Pain is required. Suffering is optional.)

I did not like this fact when I arrived in A.A. Actually, I vehemently rejected the concept back then (and for many years after) so if you’re still in that space…I’m different, I’m separate, you don’t understand me, I don’t give an eff about you, peace and love. It’s all good. When we know better, we do better.

But if you stick around here on the planet long enough, you may just kind of start to get this sneaking suspicion that we are inter-related and inter-dependent (uhhh…and yes, science and medicine both agree.) Sometimes the pain of that feeling overwhelms me. In fact, I often think the knowingness of that kept me using for years. Because there is a lot of suffering on the planet. And I can’t really do much about a lot of it. The Earth itself suffers from our abuse. I am a part of that. And in many ways, powerless over it.

So sometimes my response to that feeling of powerlessness is to deny that suffering exists. That looks like getting really really super busy and staying that way. It looks like a Louis Vuitton purse or some CHANNEL sunglasses (and by the way, no qualms here with either LV or CHANNEL.) It can look like eating and eating and eating stuffing my feelings, stuffing my voice, stuffing my fear that I am small and insignificant, and alone, capable of nothing. It can look like me curled up in a ball in my closet with the door closed screaming “I don’t give an EFF!”

For many years, my response was not denial, but instead, the yeah buts…

For example: the animal is already dead and wrapped in cellophane…why shouldn’t I eat it.

And this isn’t about meat eaters vs./vegetarians. Disclosure: I just made ceviche. “Of course I contradict myself, I am large.” That’s Walt Whitman.

It’s about….awareness I guess. And awareness is a journey. That means I can eat ceviche. My journey began in sobriety, and if I could wish you anything from your sobriety (other than not waking up next to a stranger covered in your own puke) it would be awareness. Being present.

Being present began with NO MATTER WHAT we don’t drink and use. NO MATTER WHAT. I don’t know why, but that NO MATTER WHAT stuck with me. It was like they (all the people I was definitely NOT inter-connected with) were daring me to stay sober. No matter what (for an addict or alcoholic) will get you right into the present moment.

No matter what?????????? Seriously? Now what?

There is NOTHING like pain for waking you up. But I didn’t think it would last so long.

When I was newly sober, the pain was like: I’m going to take a tire iron to your face and then let’s go get you some stitches.

Now it’s kind of a slow dull ache that just comes in the middle of shimmering green leaves, warm gentle breezes, the smell of my daughter’s hair. It’s this realization that I have expanded. The internal me, the space inside, is wider, deeper, more fertile and more barren. And I’m human, and I respond to the strangeness of it awkwardly a lot of the time. Last week I was busy being really busy, and I thought, I’m not going to write this freaking blog anymore. Then somebody liked a post or sent a comment or something and it connected me back to that space. The heart space. The put on your headphones and listen space.

I guess I keep looking for a place in my sobriety where I can get comfortable. You know what kind of comfort I’m talking about right? I’m talking about an SUV of comfort. I’m talking about a big ass MOTORHOME of comfort. I’m talking about the foie gras of comfort, the mow my lawn for $32 kind of comfort.

Except somewhere, my ‘comfort’ started getting a little itsy bit uncomfortable. And now when I see an email in my inbox with a quote for mowing my 1/3 acre of lawn for 32 bucks, I can’t help but think about the poor person (or more likely, persons) who are going to do that back-breaking work busting their butts for 2-3 hours for like $3 an hour.

I just don’t want to have that kind of relationship with another human being anymore. I just don’t. I don’t want to look at you and think I know who you are before you open your mouth. People have suffered so much to be here, alive, taking up breathing room on the planet. It’s so important to respect one another’s journeys.

I don’t want to decide who I’m going to be right this minute and stick to it. YUCK! I reject that. If it’s a mistake, so what. We’re having this magical magical experience here…god’s little science experiments. I need you. Nothing happens in a vacuum.

And we need to listen. To each other, to the breath of the planet around us, to ourselves. To our center.

Remember when I said last Monday that no matter what our head tells us, we know? Well, guess what? Sometimes we don’t know. We don’t have an effing clue. We’re rambling along a perfectly paved (notice I do not say serene…check the path in the picture…it’s smooth and paved, but I’m not sure we could call it peaceful!) road and we just can’t see what’s coming around the bend.

Sometimes I’m really grateful for that. I’m in the best place when I’m at peace with the fact that life is the ultimate space in which anything can happen, But then there are weeks where a suddenly perfect relationship seems to take a sharp left turn into insanity (thank you very much fear, resentment and hormonal flux!), your youngest child morphs into a highly charged pile of meltdowns at every opportunity, your computer decides to stop connecting to Planet E (Internet Explorer), and you wake up and realize you have accomplished nothing and you’re about to be 40 (in 9 months.) Welcome to my ‘last week.’

Even as you walk around in this strange netherworld that is posing as your otherwise amazing life…it’s hard to believe it’s actually happening. You stumble around Best Buy for three days in a row talking to an entire host of darling young kids who smile and nod patiently as they try to explain (first individually, and then they rally in small groups for more support) the various options in the Best Buy protection plan (a plan which I might add is more complex than negotiating a truce between Israel & Palestine.) And you wonder, is this what my sponsor meant over lunch last week when she said, God wants to thrill you. Why is that so hard for you to believe?

Your AA head (that’s what you’re stuck with for better or worse after you’ve been around here for a while and done a little work) keeps yapping away about what a ‘quality problem’ it is to be buying a new computer at Best Buy when Enrique (of Enrique’s Journey–it’s a page turner!) has been riding trains from Honduras through Mexico up to the border of El Norte for something like three months, exposed to every human horror you can imagine, hungry, cold, beaten, turned away again and again (anyone that says illegal immigrants are lazy clearly has no idea what they go through to get here!) just to find his mother who left him in Honduras more than 12 years ago to move north in search of work that would allow Enrique and his sister to eat something other than trash and to maybe go to school up through the 6th grade.

Yeah, you KNOW gratitude is called for in this situation, but…

It doesn’t always play out like that. Sometimes you just wind up with tears streaming down your face in the middle of Best Buy, because it’s raining and cold outside and you can’t understand the Best Buy protection plan and you have no godly idea what an ‘i5’ processor is, or whether it’s worth the money, even after it’s been explained to you a dozen times, and your lost connection with Planet E is totally screwing up your very perfectly scheduled week and even in this moment as you stand here with a wallet full of ways to pay for brand new computer…you cannot find a shred of gratitude. Period. #End of story.

Welcome to just being human. Let yourself fall apart in Best Buy. It’s fine, and the kids that work there are really too young to be permanently scarred from witnessing your break down. Go ahead and crack. It’s been a bad week. Cracking open is not necessarily a terrible response to that. Remember Akhilanda, the goddess of Never not Broken? The cracks are where the light gets in. It doesn’t get into that tightly twisted brain that’s beating you over the head with all the things you ‘should’ be feeling (like gratitude.) It gets into the real…what you are really feeling. What’s really going on. That’s the only place there is any hope of movement from.

And a week from now you’ll be writing something (on your brand new computer…and yes, it appears the i5 processor is worth the money!) and you’ll be thinking to yourself…maybe God does want to thrill me after all.

Ok, stay with me here. There seems to be a general ‘coffee’ theme running through everything I do lately. I was meeting a friend and we were having a pretty intense discussion about a pretty serious issue and I went off on a ‘journey of the coffee bean’ tangent. I was worried about her eyes glazing over, but when they filled with tears, I knew I was on the right track.

You know what my favorite thing about words is? On rare pronounced occasions they have the power to slice through all the mush inside my brain and effortlessly slide into the four-chambered thing I call a heart, instantly transforming my perception of reality.

In a nutshell: The journey of the coffee bean story is essentially one of appreciation. It’s saying, you and I (my friend) could not be sitting right here, right now, in this perfect moment, at Starbucks, enjoying this cup of coffee, unless these coffee beans had made the incredible journey here. We need to appreciate that. A cup of coffee is more than (as one of my great heroes, Ani Difranco, says) water stained with brown. The beans grew somewhere under the nurture of sun and rain. They faced tremendous obstacles. They were harvested by hands that worked long hours in (probably) difficult conditions. Many many natural resources were absorbed in order for the beans to be packaged and then put on a truck and then onto an airplane or a boat and brought here, to the United States, where more resources were used to get them ready and get them from one place to another, until finally, they could arrive here, in Austin, Texas, where a kid who calls me ‘ma’am’ and who got up way too early this morning for his own good, is grinding them in a machine and wiping down tables and washing dishes, and waiting hand and foot on people, all so that you and I, could sit here, right here, in this perfect moment and enjoy this cup of coffee and this time together.

Everything comes from somewhere. And the simple art of appreciating a cup of coffee makes us much more capable of appreciating EVERYTHING and everyone in our lives.

So as my friend was tearing up, I had that warm fuzzy feeling I get when I know that someone is feeling me, and that they’re opening up to what I’m saying, and that they’re going to take that space that’s a little wider, and little more open, back into their life when they leave me. I LOVE THAT! It’s a beautiful thing! And I love the people in my life who do that for me. So I was all about the ‘journey of the coffee bean’ story for a day or two.

BUT THEN, in related news, I read the carrot/egg/coffee story that someone posted on my Facebook. Here it is (and you can thank me later for abbreviating it, because the original takes a little long to get to the point.)

A mother and daughter are fighting. The daughter has the RIDs (restless, irritable and discontent) and she’s complaining about how hard life is. So the mother brings her in the kitchen and puts 3 pots of water on the stove. In one, she drops some carrots. In another, a few eggs. In the last one, COFFEE beans (see-weird with the coffee theme running through my life, right?)

After a while she pulls everything off the stove and asks the daughter, what do you see?

The carrots are mushy.

The egg is hard.

The beans made coffee.

Obvious enough, right?

The mother points out that all three of these things faced the same adversary…boiling water.

The carrot went in soft but let life turn it to mush. The egg went in with a tough exterior and let life turn it brittle and hard inside. The coffee beans however, transformed the adversary (boiling water) into something rich and delicious. It took time and patience, but the boiling water became coffee.

I like the story. Maybe it’s because I live in a constant state of exhaustion right now, interrupted only by an alarm clock that tells me it’s time to get up and do it all again. Maybe it’s because I think food is such an important resource and I love stories about it. Or maybe I’m just a sucker for transformation…for believing that nothing in life can have any power over us except the power we give it (I exclude alcohol and drugs from this equation, since I am CLEARLY powerless over those.)

Either way, much love today as you jump into the boiling water of life…and may you be the coffee bean and appreciate the journey.

Sometimes it’s like people only see the worst in me! Volatile? Brooding? Overbearing? That is so judgemental!

I can be difficult at times, I don’t deny that, but as I once told a boyfriend whom I lived with for about 48 1/2 hours, if you think I can be ugly on the outside, you should see what it looks like on my insides.

The truth is, I’m a mixed bag, and it’s been many many years now since I felt that ugly inside. I can be impenetrable and secretive. It’s probably the characteristic (defect perhaps) that I have the least control over. But like most of us, much of what you get from me depends on how you care for me, and of course, most of what you get from me depends on how I am caring for myself at any given time. So TAKE CARE!

I woke up this morning and my first conscious thought was, I’m so glad I’m doing this thing (meaning life.) If you’re having a hard time today, I’m sure you’re thrilled for me that I’m feeling so good. I used to want to vomit when I would hear people talk about how happy they were. That would all be part of my ‘jealous and brooding’ self. One of the ugliest things about me is that I can be belatedly (meaning not right away) happy when those I care for experience something I perceive as a great success. Ugh! It’s so ugly. But in the last several years, it’s slowly gotten better. Let me put it another way, I covet _________________. In other words, any life that’s not my own. It dates back to late 1979 (I was 7!) when I thought that if we could just move into an apartment without the sinfully disgusting puke green shag carpet, my life would get better.

I have a sister. Here she is:

We weren’t raised together (long story!) but we met exactly 20 years ago when she was 11 and I was 18. As you know from reading the blog, I was deeply into my addictions at the time, and I wasn’t afraid to share them with her on the occasion that we might be in the same house at the same time, unsupervised.

My relationship with this young lady has (at times) been a source of great pain. She is hyper-smart. And super confident. And she majored in something like nuclear fuel science. She had a college degree before I rolled out of my own puke, and most relevant perhaps, our father raised her, after he abandoned me. You can guess that the dynamics have been difficult over the years. You bet I coveted her experience in life. I coveted her LIFE! Which led me to cause her great harm at times.

But this weekend, as she shared some of the things she’s feeling and going through, I had a moment of extreme gratitude for my own personal experience (the good and the bad of it!) I realized that this person, who I really love, is suffering a very human exposure to instability and she doesn’t have any of the basic training I’ve gotten in more than 11 years in the program.

What a powerful gift it is to realize that we are driving the bus. This is what sobriety taught me. Regardless of what anyone around me is doing, saying, thinking, feeling…it doesn’t matter. It’s none of my business. Because I can’t control it. I can’t change it. I am the only person I have any control over. The last four years have been what my sister calls ‘the worst 4 years of her life’ due to some shared family dramas. But for me, they have been 4 amazing years spotted with some very bad moments. What a difference in perspectives that is. I have learned not to hold on. We have to let things go. Otherwise they eat us, quite literally, alive.

As we approach 2012, may you let it all go. Letting go makes room for new things. It clears an empty space. It’s like a controlled burn for your soul. Very very important. Otherwise you’re just an overgrown mess full of dead foliage.

Maybe instead of holding on to whatever dramas have invaded our life, what we really need is a new set of care instructions. Maybe setting a few boundaries is in order. Maybe it’s time to let someone know exactly what we need from them and to find out once and for all if that person is capable or has the desire to meet those needs. But maybe, our real happiness depends on our willingness to look for the best in life. Optimism is everything. In hope, there is possibility, promise, excitement. Whatever fills us with anger, resentment, sorrow and grief…we need to let that go, because there is absolutely nothing there for us that can help us in any way at all.

The various human ideas and interpretations of God have both served mankind, and destroyed it simultaneously. You doubt? Examine the history of the world’s religious wars.

But we can ask ourselves, “Do I now believe, or am I even willing to believe, that there is a power greater than myself?” Because as soon as we can admit that, we’re on our way to better living. And by better, I mean happier, more joyful, and with more freedom. “It has been repeatedly proven” that this kind of faith can work. We don’t have to prove the existence of a heaven or hell. We don’t have to have a God that delivers parking spots or jobs or plagues to people who are misbehaving. We can stop using the idea of God as a weapon, and let down our guard enough to begin using spiritual principles, which are represented in all major religions and faiths.

But the Big Book carries a warning. It says we are handicapped by “obstinacy, sensitiveness, and unreasoning prejudice.” And for people like us that can be deadly. Because for whatever reason, “To be doomed to an alcoholic death or to live on a spiritual basis” is a tough decision for us.

We are also handicapped by our hearing (or, should I say, our inability to hear.) I was a few years into saying the 3rd step prayer when one of its lines smacked me right in the face. It was as if I had never really heard it before. Have you had that experience in AA?

Relieve me of the bondage of self, that I may better do thy will.

Despite the fact that I am a highly verbal person, quite articulate, and scored higher on my verbal GRE than 95% of those who take the exam (I’m not bragging here…my quantitative scores were in the bottom 20%) I had up until that moment in my sobriety, failed to hear the word ‘self’ in that sentence. Because of this failure I had not realized that the below list is what I was supposed to be asking God to relieve:

~Financial fear, indecision, greed.

~Regret and/or judgment of self for things done and left undone.

~Bitterness, resentment, and carrying the weight of the known world on my shoulders.

~Anything that could be defined as me operating from my usual stance of being ‘President of the Universe.’

~The idea that I can control any person, place or thing outside of myself.

~Mothering, manipulation and martyrdom.

~Worrying about the future (either my future or the future of the planet as a whole.) This includes the potential of civil war in Afghanistan, starvation in the Sudan, the mass incarceration of people in the United States and whether or not my oldest daughter will get into the GT program at her school.

You get the point, right? I could write and write and write this list. This is self. It’s me talking. It’s me fearing. It’s me running, hiding, harboring, working really hard to ignore reality. It’s about my life, my feelings about the world, my experience. See…I’m everywhere in it. That’s the problem. I am all that I think about, and I justify that sometimes by spending time thinking about what I consider really important things.

When I started to pray and ask God to relieve me of the bondage of myself, I found so much humility. I realized that my entire life had been full of the pain of ‘me.’ And when I got that…when it made the 1,000 mile journey from my head to my heart, I started to heal from the scarring that living like that causes.

It’s been a long process. I still get into bondage. I was there yesterday. The difference for me is that I have some tools now. One of them is acceptance. Another is gratitude. And another is experience. I take a few simple steps, get out of God’s way, go to a meeting, call a friend, be of service to someone and get on with life. I get really honest about where I’m at and how I feel, and I don’t try to make it all look good. In fact, I don’t care how it looks, because I know that I can’t save my face and my ass at the same time. No matter how badly I feel…it’s going to pass and I’m going to feel something else. I know that because it has been my experience, one day at a time.

One of the statements that I could immediately get on board with when I got to AA was that “the world and it’s people were often wrong.”

I used to (and still do) hear newcomers in AA talking about their fear of doing a 4th step. I never understood that. I couldn’t wait to get to the 4th step. Make a list of all the people, places and organizations I had resentment against…ha! Easy peasy. Write down what they had done and how it had affected me? No problem! My part–well, I didn’t really think I had a part in a lot of it back then, so that didn’t worry me in the slightest.

I once filled an entire legal pad with columns of people who had pissed me off. And a wonderfully sweet woman in these rooms came over to my apartment and sat on my floor for 9 hours and listened to every one of those resentments. She bought me a pizza (at the time I mostly survived on cigarettes and Dr. Pepper.)

In that same apartment, I also once wrote a 10th step and called the Central Office of Alcoholics Anonymous and read it to a nameless, faceless alcoholic who just happened to have the unfortunate blessing of having volunteered to answer the phones there. It was some heavy stuff I read that night over the phone. It was stuff I hadn’t had the courage to put in an inventory and read to someone face to face. But I had been well-schooled in how it works. And I knew that night that if I held onto it any longer, I would drink over it.

Years into my sobriety, even after beginning to learn to look for my part in things, I was still holding on to the “yeah, but” in my life.

~Yeah, I stole $500 from an old woman (that woman happened to be my grandmother…what a creep I was!) who was suffering from Alzheimer’s…but she knew where I was all my life and never reached out to help me.

~Yeah, I took my father’s car and totaled it and left it on the side of a road without even calling, but he did abandon me @ birth.

~Yeah, I ran away from home and left my mother for months not knowing if I was dead or alive, but she did attempt suicide on the morning of my 17th birthday.

~Yeah, I lived on food that I stole from the all night grocery store at 2 a.m. in the morning, but a person has to eat don’t they?

You get the point. In sobriety, my ‘yeah, but’ problem got even worse. I went from being a little hoodlum to being a sober member of the community. I do good things. I am of service. I’m not drinking or drugging for God’s sake. Now I’m really armed with grandiosity, righteousness, and an overall sense of believing that I know how the world and its people should behave. There’s nothing more dangerous than a sober alcoholic armed with a moral code. And for years, and I mean like a decade, I battled the concept that my moral code is the right one and anyone who isn’t falling in line with that is a screwed up, worthless idiot in need of a lot of help (mine, right?)

But I’ve been lucky that in all the years I suffered from that (and that defect has largely been removed from me with a lot of work, prayer and willingness to let it go) I had women in my life who kept reminding me that I could be right, and be miserable.

“Do you want to be right, or do you want to be happy?” That’s what Eleanor (my 79 year old sponsor in L.A. used to ask me.)

My answer to that question has changed profoundly over the years. I used to say that when I’m right, I am happy, but that was never actually the case for me. In fact, the opposite was true. The more right I was, the more miserable.

So you’re right. I give you that today if you need to hear it. But I want to ask you something now:

SO WHAT, NOW WHAT?

Being right is worthless. It’s a chip we carry around on our shoulder and it’s heavy. It’s a weapon in our arsenal that we use to judge the people around us, and it’s the ultimate enemy of humility and gratitude.

I just can’t afford to be right anymore. I can have a moral code. I can believe I know how I should live, what I should do. I can take healthy positive action to make the things materialize for me that I want. This is all a part of ‘NOW WHAT.’ Now what is about action. It’s about recognizing that I can’t control people, places and things. I can only control (barely, and with God’s help and yours) myself. That’s where I need to put my energy.

So be right…if you need that. We all do sometimes. But don’t get stuck there. Move forward and be (a quiet) example of what needs to change around you. That’s the power of attraction.

Well, it probably goes without saying that the response to my post on gratitude has been overwhelming.

It turns out you guys like being mentioned as much as I enjoy an annual romp in the sack of sentimentality. At this point I’m kind of thinking I should stop writing about recovery and start writing greeting cards.

It’s also impressive to note that my Twitter audience seems to be growing at an exponential pace that even I, with my Type A personality, could not have predicted…and of course, I love that, and I’m totally trying to figure out how that’s happening so I can harness it and make it happen more–I mean after all, more is better.

I just love alcoholics and drug addicts. Seriously. I mean when you drag us out of the gutter and stick us under a hot shower, get us a haircut and put 15 or 20 lbs on us, we clean up so well. And we love to support each other.

~You wanna fly airplanes? I’m totally down with that!

~You wanna go to the firing range and shoot AKs at a target we pretend is your ex-husband? Done.

~You wanna take a 4 day trek to Machu Picchu? Right on.

I mean its’ some really beautiful shit, because we often come from places where whatever support there might have been is long gone. Or maybe we never got what we really needed to begin with. So we’re kind of in this thing together, just rocking the party, doin the deal, making it happen.

This is the last hurrah on being 11. It’s time to dig in and see what I can make this year bring me, how I can make each day serve me as I serve a power greater than myself. As a friend says, its’ a little humble, a little cocky. It’s knowing that sobriety allows me to do anything…and then having the guts to actually try something.

Despite the confidence that practically eeks out of every word, a lot of times I feel a little awkward and kind of like I don’t know what to do next. I think in part that’s why I’ve always loved words. They can build bravado around something that’s really crumbling (I can hardly resist the urge to go Politico on your ass right now!)

But come to think of it, that’s exactly how I felt when I was 11 years old–I was crumbling. And I’m gonna assume that since I was popping blood pressure pills and heart medication in 1983 just to see what happened (obviously I didn’t know they were blood pressure pills–for Christ’s sake, give me some credit!) this year is going to be a lot better than that one.

So I sat down and started making a list of some of the people in my sobriety who have changed my life over the past 11 years. Yeah…you know who you are! I’m down with some heavy hitters in these rooms (hee hee!) and today I want to pay a little praise. This is my hometown, AA. It’s where I feel at peace (in the rooms) even when people are saying crazy shit. It’s where I take my troubles, where I find my solutions. Many many people have influenced my path, but what I’ve learned here is that it’s always my choice to open to them.

Disclaimer: I have a horrible memory and I’m totally socially awkward at times, so if you don’t see your name on the list and you KNOW it belongs there…send me a line. I’m already working on the post, 12 years of thanks!

Mary Cleo, the big MCG, not to be confused with MGD–a beer I never really liked, though I wasn’t picky. Thank you for getting off the bus that night in front of Radford Hall. You were just doing what you did (this was before MC got her license), showing up places where you said you’d be. I was sitting inside an 8 o’clock meeting scheming with another newcomer on how to get to MacArthur Park for a little somethin’ somethin’ if you know what I mean. When I stepped onto Ventura Blvd. @ 9 p.m. with him next to me, there you were to intercept us.

“Where you going?” you asked.

“Coffee. Late night. You know, the usual,” I said.

He took off in the other direction and I stayed sober that night. You saved my life in so many countless ways, so many times, that I can’t possibly put them all here. I adore you!

Kate L., I know a lot of people in the program, but to this day (almost 14 years later!) I don’t know anyone with a better grin or a bigger heart. You convinced me (without saying a word) that I could still be naughty and have fun in sobriety. You were a wide open space for my heart when I was lost and alone. You taught me by example that we can survive the most extreme pain and stare down a bottle of alcohol on a kitchen table (although I can’t say this is a technique I recommend 🙂 What I love about you Kate, and have loved about you, is your humaness. Knowing you has changed me forever.

Elsie A., What can I say? We’ve laughed, we’ve cried. I still turnover inside every time I hear your voice. How can years go by and two people still be so connected that they can get on the phone and it’s like they were sitting at Sbux together, last Monday night? If it wasn’t for you, I might never have learned to text. You were the first woman to teach me about being a mother in sobriety–a beautiful gift I can only pass on, never repay. I love all things pink please, and girlie, and that smell good…like candles and incense and fluffy pillows and clean sheets. There were times when your home was the safe place I needed. Big love.

Heather T., When he broke my heart I mumbled around my life for months obsessed, depressed and basically jacked up on drama and self-pity. You gave me this card that said, “God has a plan and it’s better than yours.” I don’t think I ever told you how much I needed to hear those words that day, and as it turns out, you were right. I met my husband in your swimming pool. Weird!

JM, thank you for loving me–it’s not always easy. I’m inspired by you every day. I never know what you’re gonna do or say next. You make me laugh, and more important, you teach me how to laugh at myself. I think your tattoos are hot and we make good-looking, eco-friendly, vegetarian kids who tell their friends things like, “heart disease is a food-born illness and the United States stole Texas from the Native Americans.” I still get the goosebumps and you are the most courageous person I know.

Toni J., I don’t think anyone has ever believed in me more than you do. How can I thank you for years of friendship, support, and encouragement? For laughing with me, always listening, for teaching me to question my own judgments and for always telling me your truth. You are the single best ambassador of goodwill for this program that I have ever met. You truly live the concepts of service and I learned, in part from you, how to not be so afraid of people.

Anne W., Lovely Anne. If it had not been for meeting you at B2S when I first came to Austin, I might never have believed that girls from L.A. can survive and thrive in Texas. You were in this space of transformation when I met you, and I count myself lucky to have continued to see you grow.

Kim M, There’s something so hard to put into words about the gifts you share with me. It’s the kind of love and advice only a mama can give, and god knows, I need that sometimes. Thanks for telling me the truth and not letting me get away with stuff. I know at the core of me that you are always there, walking the path.

Kiely R., Kiely, Kiely, Kiely. Good lord woman! Thanks for being a homegirl, a road dog, an accomplice, a guru, a friend…for the endless laughs, tears, challenges, struggles and for deep meaningful insight into Huff Post and the West Wing. You are transforming right in front of me and it’s inspiring to watch.

Anita P., Thank you for making me feel safe and helping me find breathing room on the planet.

Shawna, for trudging the path with me! It’s so hard when we do it alone.

Gemma, there’s something soft and mellow about you that goes down easy. I love your passion for this thing and your drive to make a difference, and I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t say I’m at least a little infatuated by your name, Gemma, like Katy Segal on Sons of Anarchy! She’s a badass and so are you!

Beth C., How does someone get sober so young and go from being where you were to being a college graduate with a degree in Nuclear Environmental Brain Science–or whatever the hell that is you majored in? BAM! You remind me that anything is possible!

Bethany, You remind me to make time for things that are important and to care. I love your passion for animals and the planet and your children.

Bonnie H., you radiate from the heart with goodness and you have, quite possibly, the gentlest spirit I have ever known. You remind me to be soft.

Catherine K., Everyone needs someone who understands the darkness they sometimes feel. Your personal path and our shared common histories with family have opened up places in me that I didn’t think could be healed.

Erica G., Damn girl! I can’t believe you already have a year. Thanks for showing me that it’s still working in people’s lives.

Harris S., who has said a gazillion inspirational things that struck that soft space in my heart where recovery lives.

Jennifer V., for reminding me that we can survive anything.

Martha K., your weekly emails remind me to keep AA in the middle of it all.

Vanessa W., you are so important to me.

Maren C., Goodness…I just giggle when I think of you. I’m in love with your brain. You are so hyper-creative that it freaks me out and makes me want to go to art school all at the same time. DON’T ANALYZE this Maren! Your hair looks great! We share that kind of brain that grabs onto something and tears it apart like a rabid dog. I love watching you with your family, your kids, in the thick of it, just doing the deal. I know you take this thing deadly serious and I heart you.

Nina B., I couldn’t end this list without mentioning you. There are people who come into our lives for a reason and I can’t imagine where I’d be right now if you hadn’t taught me to tell a different story. I am so grateful for those 4 words. They have changed everything for me.

I may have to do another list. There are so many people who have inspired and helped me grow up into my sobriety. But just looking at this list fills me with happiness. When I got here (to sobriety) I was a kid with almost nothing and no one left. People didn’t want to be around me. It just hurt too much. I could go on writing forever, filling these pages with people who said things and did things that changed me. So that’s gratitude, and I’m grateful to every single one of them. But I’m equally grateful that over the last 11 years I have constantly tried to open my heart. Its’ always like that, either opening to life or shutting it out.